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Ambling Toward… House?

So, I have a house. Well, half a house. And a cat. A whole cat (minus certain parts). And despite my best intentions, this seems to have happened somewhat by surprise.

Last year, I had gotten into something of a state of unambitious comfort with the Big Corporate Beast that I worked for at the time — it was a nice enough place, with interesting people, and in many ways decidedly static. One of the folks I’d worked with had worked with earlier forms of this company since a few months before I was born, and so far as I know he’s still working there. Periodically, I entertained the thought of seeing if there was any hope for me in the downtown startup market, but keeping the principle of “grass is greener” in mind, I would always decide “eh, things are fine now, maybe later”. Well, about a month after the last time I did this I got a meeting invite from my boss with a very nonspecific sort of subject.

Naturally, it turns out that the meeting was about the application of the Chaos Monkey theory to my career, i.e. I’d been the lucky fool selected for the next round of layoffs. Over the course of the next couple months, I played most of the Half-Life series, all of the Portal series, bought a lot of exercise equipment (I don’t recommend this, necessarily, but it didn’t turn out badly), finally filed for unemployment, and then sent out my first set of job applications.

It turns out there was hope for me in the startup market. Actually it turns out that there was a bit of a feeding frenzy in the market, and within a week of looking up the instructions for applying for unemployment I was trying to find the button to push that said “uhm, never mind”. Not to mention finding the place to turn in my Millennial card, I guess.

So I ended up with pretty much the job I wanted originally, although with a somewhat silly commute (essentially from the outer edge of the city to downtown) until I got to the end of the lease on my apartment, at which point I would naturally rent another apartment somewhere closer to downtown and… sign another lease… pet deposit… move out of white walled apartment cube… move into other white walled apartment cube this one maybe with Deluxe Granite Countertops… sigh…

While I was contemplating THAT prospect, I went to a game event that one of my friends was holding at their house. The house they’d bought, south of downtown, that was old and interesting and close to public transit and definitely not a white cube. The house that was surrounded by other houses, some of them similar, some of them for sale, some of them that could potentially be sold to me by the realtor of my friend, who I called the next week…

Couple months later, I had me half a house (i.e. a half duplex, which it turns out is a fairly common item of older housing in this area) with its very own set of Deluxe Granite Countertops and no pet deposit, although not for lack of trying on the part of the pet. I feel as if this speaks ominously regarding my career as a personal finance blogger, being as such things are apparently meant to be done with a lot more spreadsheets and a lot less “oh, might as well”, but then again that was probably doomed to begin with.